Grub hell

[Crawford Sausage Company]

This new gaming machine can't go more than 12 hours
before freezing up. I don't know if it's this cheap
ass Lenovo or Ubuntu 16.04 which has been a very
problematic install.

tl;dr I need to rant

<rant>
I started googling based on syslog messages and
one of the things to try is turn acpi off in grub
which directs the bootloader. I haven't played
with grub in many years so am a bit rusty.
They changed everything around once again.
I put in the acpi=off in the right place and reboot
and then nothing but a blank screen. Fuck!!!!!

Now in the old days when you fucked with grub and
made a mistake you simply hit e and edit the line
in the start menu. Or boot from CD and edit
grub.conf which was always in /boot/grub or /boot
in the real old days. You used a text editor and
that was that.

Now it's so fucking complicated I'm not really
sure what I did. The actual bootloader
is some windows executable on its own fat32
partition so somehow that needed to be rebuilt
which required a special gui tool plus a
lot of copy/pasting and I don't know what it
was doing to rebuild whatever the fuck was
in /EFI/Boot directory. Then if you forget
to compile this thing with Secure Boot off
you're fucked again and have to do the entire
god damned thing over again.

I tried to do it without the gui but all the
howtos were out of date even though they
were written in 2015.

What a fucking cluster fuck. It was a joy
when it boot again and I'll never fuck with
grub again.


</rant>


I hate taking shit back but I really want
to pack this Lenovo up and trade it in for
a box that cost twice as much. I suspect/hope
it's a cooling issue since it has been very hot
inside here the last few days. The cooling system
in this cheap ass box looks rinky dink. Once
fall hits it will be very cool inside.

[barbie gee]

test yer "too hot" theory by having a fan blow on the machine to improve
cooling.

or turn on the damned air conditioner...

[Crawford Sausage Company]

Summer is pretty much over. I did use an air conditioner earlier
this week for the first time this season because it was so hot
and muggy.

I would be happy if it was just a cooling problem. That can be fixed.
I switched the
drive back to Windows 10 and will run it all weekend. If it doesn't
crash for Windows then it's an Ubuntu problem, possibly some weirdness
with this high end graphics card required for gaming. If it crashes then
back to Microcenter it goes. It's nice being able to physically bring
something back instead messing with shipping.

[Crawford Sausage Company]

It's an Ubuntu problem Windows 10 is stable. The hardware all checks
out using their diagnostics. Good news I don't have
to deal with a return, bad news I have to use Windows 10. Just when
I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

[Bruce Esquibel]

Crawford Sausage Company <m...@brandylion.com> wrote:

> It's an Ubuntu problem Windows 10 is stable. The hardware all checks
> out using their diagnostics. Good news I don't have
> to deal with a return, bad news I have to use Windows 10. Just when
> I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Still don't understand why you went with the 16.x over the 14.x version of
Ubuntu. Like I said, when stuff broke with 16 that I didn't have anything to
do with, went back to the 14 and everything is smooth sailing again.

I don't do anything with windows but that 10 seems like they buried too much
stuff in the background that you don't know it's doing.

-bruce
b...@ripco.com

[Crawford Sausage Company]

On Monday, September 12, 2016 at 5:54:31 AM UTC-5, Bruce Esquibel wrote:
> Crawford Sausage Company <m...@brandylion.com> wrote:
>
> > It's an Ubuntu problem Windows 10 is stable. The hardware all checks
> > out using their diagnostics. Good news I don't have
> > to deal with a return, bad news I have to use Windows 10. Just when
> > I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
>
>
> Still don't understand why you went with the 16.x over the 14.x version of
> Ubuntu. Like I said, when stuff broke with 16 that I didn't have anything to
> do with, went back to the 14 and everything is smooth sailing again.

I made a mistake. I use the box for video and image processing and they
took away ffmpeg in 14.x and although you can reinstall I was afraid it
wouldn't install right and all my scripts would have problems. They
brought it back with the distro in 16.x.

I like 16.04. Once you get rid of Unity and Gnome3, LXDE, XFCE, and Mate
work well and fast. Steam works too as I installed some heavy on the
graphics demos and it ran well. There is something weird going on that
causes one CPU to lock and then the entire system freezes. I can't isolate
a single process because there have been different ones that hit 100%
because something was blocking them. Fixing this is over my head and
it's harder to play with different kernels because grub is so fucked
up with UEFI, that secure boot.

> I don't do anything with windows but that 10 seems like they buried too much
> stuff in the background that you don't know it's doing.

Windows 10 down/uploaded 40M data since 11pm last night. I played solitaire
for awhile and had to sit through 15 second advertisements.

With Steam I can play on Windows and wait it out for a few months
and then switch to Ubuntu and I won't have to buy the games again.

[Crawford Sausage Company]

On Monday, September 12, 2016 at 5:54:31 AM UTC-5, Bruce Esquibel wrote:

> Still don't understand why you went with the 16.x over the 14.x version of
> Ubuntu. Like I said, when stuff broke with 16 that I didn't have anything to
> do with, went back to the 14 and everything is smooth sailing again.

I've been running Ubuntu 16.04 in a VM for awhile with Windows 10 as
a host and it has frozen up on me three times already. There is
something very wrong with that distro. So I download 14.10 to try
it out in a VM and it's not supported so I can't install any
software using apr-get. WTF. Just give me the last version guys
and I'll rough it.

Not sure I want to go back to 14.04 because that's April 2014. I'll
muddle through with this Windows Update shit. Every time I have to
reboot this machine I wonder if it's the last time it boots.
Total fucking bullshit. So far they've made me reboot twice
in the last 2 weeks. I wouldn't mind doing this once a month
but every fucking week is too much. Hopefully in 6 months the
nerds will have the major bugs in Ubuntu 16.04 worked out and
I can ditch this Windows 10 POS.

Steam runs nice and I got Cities Skylines for $10 on sale.
Spent $700 to play a $10 game.

[Bruce Esquibel]

Crawford Sausage Company <m...@brandylion.com> wrote:

> I've been running Ubuntu 16.04 in a VM for awhile with Windows 10 as
> a host and it has frozen up on me three times already. There is
> something very wrong with that distro. So I download 14.10 to try
> it out in a VM and it's not supported so I can't install any
> software using apr-get. WTF. Just give me the last version guys
> and I'll rough it.

Hmm, you mean the 14.10 isn't supported in the VM anymore?

I'm running the 14.04LTS on that file server/backup/media thing here and the
apt-get and installing software works fine. I dunno how long it'll be
supported but I don't need much on it.

Even the "updates are ready to be installed" is still working nearly daily.

> Not sure I want to go back to 14.04 because that's April 2014. I'll
> muddle through with this Windows Update shit. Every time I have to
> reboot this machine I wonder if it's the last time it boots.
> Total fucking bullshit. So far they've made me reboot twice
> in the last 2 weeks. I wouldn't mind doing this once a month
> but every fucking week is too much. Hopefully in 6 months the
> nerds will have the major bugs in Ubuntu 16.04 worked out and
> I can ditch this Windows 10 POS.

Somewhat related, yesterday Melissa was asking about an old usb scanner we
have laying around. It hasn't been supported since the mid 2000's by either
the mac or windows (it's like a canon model 1 usb, self-powered) and figured
since the linux guys build and maintain drivers for 30 year old Maytag
washing machines, I'd plug it into the Toshiba laptop I installed that 16.04
in also, around the same time I tinkered with the server box.

The laptop booted and I was able to log in, but as soon as I clicked on that
first icon for a file search, the screen blanked and it rebooted. With the
second attempt, it found the "Simple Scan" but didn't detect the scanner.

Oh well.

On a lark I figure I'd plug it into the server box with the 14.04 and sure
enough, not only detected it without any voodoo, it scanned/saved the
documents just fine in pdf format. One usb drive copy later, we were all
done.

I don't follow the ubuntu forums enough to see if this crap is the norm but
I did notice on everyblock.com there is a mention of a "free operating
system users group" that meet at the Golden Nugget on Irving Park Rd. once a
month.

If it's more than one fat guy telling you "your lips sure are purty", I
might drop in and see if there is anything to learn about this. Then again
it might be some BSD guys still working on scsi-1 hardware or complaining
about how IDE drives are hard to find.

-bruce
b...@ripco.com

[Crawford Sausage Company]

On Wednesday, October 5, 2016 at 7:16:31 AM UTC-5, Bruce Esquibel wrote:
> Crawford Sausage Company <m...@brandylion.com> wrote:
>
> > I've been running Ubuntu 16.04 in a VM for awhile with Windows 10 as
> > a host and it has frozen up on me three times already. There is
> > something very wrong with that distro. So I download 14.10 to try
> > it out in a VM and it's not supported so I can't install any
> > software using apr-get. WTF. Just give me the last version guys
> > and I'll rough it.
>
> Hmm, you mean the 14.10 isn't supported in the VM anymore?
>
> I'm running the 14.04LTS on that file server/backup/media thing here and the
> apt-get and installing software works fine. I dunno how long it'll be
> supported but I don't need much on it.

Apparently you can still apt-get on LTS versions. I didn't know this.
In Fedora you can get repo installs on any version. I sometimes
add stuff on Fedora 14 no problem. I'm now going to soak a 14.04
in a VM and see if it's stable, which it probably is since you're
using it. If it is I'll buy another hard drive and see if it
works with the real hardware. I like Windows 10 UI but need to
run my PCs for months between reboots and Microsoft doesn't allow
its potted plants to do that anymore.


The funny thing about these 16.04 freezes is that nothing is recorded
being funny in any logs. Nothing. I suspect this has something to
do with that systemd crap which only logs bullshit. If you try and
manually take control of network interfaces it's a constant battle
with systemd and errors you get are "Interface Failed" and no other
goddamned reason. I don't understand the mindset of these developers
not allowing a user to disable their greatness.

> Somewhat related, yesterday Melissa was asking about an old usb scanner we
> have laying around. It hasn't been supported since the mid 2000's by either
> the mac or windows (it's like a canon model 1 usb, self-powered) and figured
> since the linux guys build and maintain drivers for 30 year old Maytag
> washing machines, I'd plug it into the Toshiba laptop I installed that 16.04
> in also, around the same time I tinkered with the server box.
>
> The laptop booted and I was able to log in, but as soon as I clicked on that
> first icon for a file search, the screen blanked and it rebooted. With the
> second attempt, it found the "Simple Scan" but didn't detect the scanner.
>
> Oh well.
>
> On a lark I figure I'd plug it into the server box with the 14.04 and sure
> enough, not only detected it without any voodoo, it scanned/saved the
> documents just fine in pdf format. One usb drive copy later, we were all
> done.

I never attempt to attach peripherals to linux boxes. Mine were designed
for Windows and work best in Windows which is the only reason I still run
Windows. I'd like to buy an official licensed Windows7 DVD so I could
make a VirtualBox VM. My Windows7 VM is a VMWare image that can't convert.
Even though I hear Larry Ellison is a complete penis and Oracle has
horrible extortion like business practices, Virtual Box is a quality
(free for now) product.

>
> I don't follow the ubuntu forums enough to see if this crap is the norm but
> I did notice on everyblock.com there is a mention of a "free operating
> system users group" that meet at the Golden Nugget on Irving Park Rd. once a
> month.
>
> If it's more than one fat guy telling you "your lips sure are purty", I
> might drop in and see if there is anything to learn about this. Then again
> it might be some BSD guys still working on scsi-1 hardware or complaining
> about how IDE drives are hard to find.

Wasn't there a computer club a long time ago that used to meet
at Barnabees on Touhy?

[Bruce Esquibel]

Crawford Sausage Company <m...@brandylion.com> wrote:

> Wasn't there a computer club a long time ago that used to meet
> at Barnabees on Touhy?

No clue, probably was at one time or another. I went to a few of them over
the past couple of decades but nothing memorable.

I think at one time there were 3 just for macintosh, one city and the other
two in the northern and south suburbs, usually at someones house. The os2/warp
guys had them, a few a year at least. The apple 2 people were more along
the lines of disk copy parties. Probably was the same for the commodore
folks.

I thought they all went away due to the online social networking crap, really
no need for them. There was a few I heard about recently with "hackers", both
the whitehat and blackhat guys that can show you how to secure your device
and install/use tor and why you want to use it. They were open to the public.

Sarlo used to host the 2600 meetups, bet those were hysterical.

I dunno who these guys are that meet at the golden nugget, if they exist even.

Could be a broke cron job that posts that message every month for all I know.

-bruce
b...@ripco.com

[Bruce Esquibel]

Bruce Esquibel <b...@ripco.com> wrote:

> I dunno who these guys are that meet at the golden nugget, if they exist even.

> Could be a broke cron job that posts that message every month for all I know.

Ha,

I was looking around for something else last night and found those guys that
have the golden nugget meetups...

http://ufo.chicago.il.us

Never heard of them.

Only takes a minute to see the whole website.

-bruce
b...@ripco.com

[Cydrome Leader]

I can confirm it's a bunch of retards like you might expect. I'm sort of
suprised their meeting place isn't the lincoln restaurant.

They finally shoveled that dump into a hole in the ground. Building is
completely gone now.

[smr]

I never understood the love for that place. Worst fuckin' diner in this area,
by far.

I did take a nice pic of the wife with the hyooge Lincoln sign that used to
overhang Lincoln Ave. when it was dumped in the empty parking lot behind it on
Irving. They hauled that away a few weeks ago; how it surved two weeks in
that parking lot without some gangbanger tagging it is a miracle.

--
smr